


Unreal City

by aelaya



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games)
Genre: F/F, Gen, Mages and Templars, Magical Scholars and Academics, The Aeonar, The Chantry, The Fade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-04
Updated: 2018-03-04
Packaged: 2019-03-26 16:44:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13861746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aelaya/pseuds/aelaya
Summary: 9:41 Dragon, in the most infamous magical prison in Thedas.





	Unreal City

_The Old Gods will call to you,_

_From their ancient prisons they will sing._

Silence 3:6

In the unlit night the templars laughed louder and rattled around the prison holding the chains out in front of them like they were afraid to know their own hands, what they did with them during the day. When a prisoner had not seen the sun—or had been blinded and could not see anything at all—the laughter ringing out through the halls was a dead giveaway. The Chantry was afraid of the night but not the dark, which to Val seemed very apropos of everything, the terror of what something symbolised and not the thing itself.

Daily the prison was swept up and down for bloodstains on the stone so a mage could not use it in rites, sacred rites, the evil rites of the maleficarum who spent most of their time crouching in corners like wild animals spitting muttered curses and jets of coal from their fingertips when they could not manage fire. Usually the first physical sign a prisoner’s magic had been obliterated was the warping of their devilry. Val knew a middle-aged, prematurely greying woman who tried to save up her magic and never used it until finally she conjured a sword, and it materialised the wrong way ‘round in her hand so the blade was cutting her palm. She tried to swing it around but the spiritual weight of the steel was too much and the templar facing her grinned, grasped the pommel angled up at him, and drove the blade into her chest until she gasped and the whole sword stuttered and blinked in and out of existence. And then she was left with her body and its blood, and the templar standing over her wringing his hand out and jeering that she should have conjured a rope and done it herself, that’s why they installed the new hooks in the ceiling, isn’t it, now his hand’s all—and he shook out his arm and laughed with his friends. Magic leaves a strange feeling in a man’s skin, like an ache.

Val had, as of yet, managed to keep her magic. Blood magic was widely believed to be rooted in the power of sacrifice and pain, but three years ago she conducted a short-lived study in the Anderfels and found a distinct correlation between the potency of a spell drawn from blood and the amount of iron in the blood used, based on templars’ reports of more powerful feats of magic occuring in and around the mines of the Hunterhorn Mountains, which were largely iron quarries. For two years Val had worn a band of Fade-touched iron on her ring finger and called it an engagement ring, and it helped her keep her magic sane. Inside had been carved a quote from _Verses of Dreams_ , until a chantry sister had confiscated it for being libelous of the Chantry and returned it with Transfigurations 1:2 (‘they shall be named Maleficar, accursed ones. They shall find no rest in this world or beyond—’) etched into both the inner and outer surface. It had taken months to rub the ring smooth and free of Andraste’s influence. It had also taken months for the news to trickle through that the Inquisitor was a powerful mage, formerly of the Ostwick Circle, and she woke from nightmares of the Circle in silence too scared to scream, and her spymaster and ambassador were worried and her commander said snidely he got nightmares, too, and the qunari mercenary and the dwarf took him aside in front of the whole bar and punched him bloody to the ground and asked if those nightmares were very bad, if he dreamt in such vicious radiant pain he woke up with magical lacerations arcing out from his chest, over his heart, because she _did_. And they think the elf apostate has a recipe for aiding an untroubled sleep but he’s also not a very good herbalist, really, and keeps his deadly toxins in with his regular herbs and elixirs. But he should let them know if there’s anything they can do to help.

The prisoners of Aeonar knew this because one of the new arrivals had been there, a recruit who had been disguising her magic quite successfully, she said, until a fellow soldier was practising an illicit purge in the barracks and looked over to find her dragging her nails down her arm trying to keep quiet, bits of green smoke escaping her mouth and nostrils from the barrier she’d drawn up to muffle the edges of her magic. From there it was a hop, skip and a jump to the most infamous prison in Thedas, she who had kept herself out of the Circle through sheer self-control and reciting the Chant backwards in the night. _Unbroken darkness in sorrow-blinded eyes._ The story had been circulating in the prison for several weeks until the new arrival was brought into an office and walked out supported by two chantry sisters, smiling wide and quoting the Chant in its proper order.

_Eyes sorrow-blinded, in darkness unbroken_

_There 'pon the mountain, a voice answered my call._

Andraste 1:7

There seemed to be fewer new prisoners, now, despite the Inquisition wreaking havoc in the south. Likely the Chantry was intimidated by the Inquisition’s growing might and influence, especially after its alliance with the rebel mages, and felt less inclined to rock the boat. After Kirkwall mages were sent to Aeonar in droves for whatever offence caught the templars’ eyes, as part of the Chantry’s struggle to reassert its control, but instead of reigniting that healthy fear of punishment that had served the Chantry so well for so many years, the mages lost any fear they’d ever had hidden away behind earnest pamphlet campaigns and rose up as one and said they might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb. Aeonar swelled up with new blood, but the prisoners were untested and blotted themselves out on the ramparts because the Veil was thin and growing thinner, translucent so even the Templars could hear the whispers which became howls and hysterical shrieks and, finally, a silence so complete it felt like calm. So they joined it.

Val was brought in at first for an interview, set up by a colleague who was also a Chantry scholar, about her research into magic. She was escorted into a brightly lit office belonging to a former Knight-Captain in Nevarra, an Orlesian by birth who had left Val Royeaux for ‘greener pastures’, which was later translated by a former Circle mage as ‘a Circle which doesn’t keep its birth/death records updated’. The man watched her over the rim of his teacup as she explained her work, how it began in her hometown in Ferelden after a child was tortured to death by a gang of teenagers for supposedly having magic, only what they thought was magic was only gossip based on a rumour based on idle speculation, and the subsequent investigation revealed no sign of any magic at all, even the feeble, nascent magical outbursts of the very young. Except just before the child died of blood loss, he ran a shaking hand over his wounds and _healed_ them to white marks, looking, according to the teenagers, astonished. There were no mages in his family as far back as anyone could find, and Val had wondered, herself then seven years old (she did not mention that as the age at which she was learning to conjure wispy quills that trailed fractured light, and quickening her footsteps by manipulating gravity), if magic itself could be a result of trauma, if harrowing experiences split open a person’s connection to the Fade. So she migrated to the University of Denerim at seventeen and began studying magic and the Fade.

At this point, her interviewer held up a hand and asked, “so how do you stop it?”

Val stared.

“The magic, how do you—” he slashed his hand through the air and grinned a bit, deliberately lopsidedly, like he thought he was a maverick. “It’d be a lot easier to stamp them out if they didn’t exist in the first place.”

Later Val was told he was assessing her reaction, looking to see if she got angry or defensive, and she felt a small shred of satisfaction that she didn’t give herself away then. Or when she was led out after the interview, and caught sight of a mage licking a red substance off the walls and scratching at his palms, and was told the substance was really the crushed fleshy pods of the deathroot plant, but it was funny to watch him try to do blood magic while he lost the sacred knowledge of his own name hallucinating magisterial status, deathroot pods having hallucinatory properties, and it might sound cruel but last month he went insane and breathed fire at a templar. The templar escorting Val out said it was a clever punishment, because that was when he scorched his mouth and tongue and lost the ability to taste.

The second time Val was brought in, it was in chains, and she was dragged by a few brutes into that same office where she’d watched her interviewer spike his tea with brandy, only now he’d dropped that would-be roguish smile and signed off on her indefinite imprisonment.

She had been held there for almost two years now. Mostly her days were spent like any other prisoner’s, in her cell, glazing her eyes over with veils from the beyond, listening to the call of the Fade, talking goodnaturedly with demons and spirits in her sleep only to wake up with a nosebleed from high-pressure psychological warfare, and ending always the pleas for possession with a promise that they could have her when she was dead, if they got in before her body was burned as per standard Chantry practice.

One particular demon appeared regularly in her dreams. Her face swirled and crawled as if there were insects crawling just beneath the skin, but when she stilled the swarms she was beautiful.

“The templar who reds his hair with dye is looking for you,” she said once, but the next day the templar dropped dead a foot from her cell door. He was nicer than the rest, practically a decent man, and his hair went up in flames. Redder than ever.

Val asked her about it a week later. She hadn’t cared much about the man, but it seemed he had cared about her.

“I guess I just _saw red_ ,” the demon said, smugly. “I don’t like people with red hair. It always seems symbolic of a fiery nature, and then they’re just _people_. People don’t have natures. They barely have names, and never ones I can remember. Spirits at least have a major trait. Rage, or terror … Most people don’t care to stick to one.” 

“What are you.”

The demon glanced up at the spires of the Black City on the horizon. “I haven’t decided yet, but when I get one I’ll stick to it.”

Actually the demon (whose name changed often but seemed most frequently to choose Satina, the shadow moon) was a very good source for Val’s research, ongoing despite her incarceration.

“What does possessing a person feel like? I know why you do it, most texts indicate some level of jealousy, a desire to join the living, but what is the physical sensation?”

“I don’t know. Haven’t tried it.”

Val looked at her in disbelief. “You’re a _demon_. Is this—are you going to embody deceit? Was last week lust, when you appeared in my dreams with a hand up my robe, are you just going to try on every bad thing there is to see what fits?”

“I wasn’t even aware you had that dream. I wasn’t there. Was I good?”

At Val’s raised eyebrow, Satina beamed. “Alright, I was there. And I already know I was good.

“I’ve never possessed anyone that way. I’ve been here for a few hundred years, I’ve never had the urge. It’s cheap.”

“Why.”

She lifted a hand and made a nameless gesture. “You’re just possessing their body. You’ve got their experiences, you can fill out their synapses and memory blanks with whatever you want, but it’s still borrowed. And almost always unbidden. You’re gatecrashing. There are better ways to own someone.”

Val looked up at her tone. “Such as?”

Satina smiled very sharply, and the things beneath her skin pulsed like a vein.

“I don’t need to possess you to _possess_ you.”

She stretched out on the black rock and trailed a finger through the raw lyrium trickling down behind her.

Slowly, Val got up and walked over to Satina, sitting against a boulder with the lyrium dripping from her hand like honey. She lifted Satina’s hand to her mouth and licked her finger until the lyrium hit her system, and then she kissed her, felt the maddening quiver of all those moving parts, cogs and springs, perhaps fine dwarven machinery, come to a standstill against her lips. Satina laughed into her mouth, wild and a little desperate, and brought her left hand up to cup the back of Val’s head, her right hand still sticky from the lyrium. There was a wind sweeping through their corner of the Fade, which was impossible, because the Fade had no weather, but it rustled their hair and together they turned to the Black City in the distance, its seven gates swinging in the wind, unlatched and ready to shatter.

_At a touch, the gate swung wide,_

_And the Light parted before them like a curtain_

_Swept aside by nothing. Fearful to touch them._

_And none saw the black mark_

_Spreading like a sore upon the shining gate_

_Where mortal hand had lain._

Silence 2:9, Dissonant Verse


End file.
